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Monthly Archives: April 2015

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all in on science and evidence based medicine and research. I believe we can always be improving upon the care that we provide.

Why is it then that our local poo flinging monkeys “leaders” insist on always changing the way that things are done at least every 6 months? How are we supposed to actually do anything approaching research into effectiveness in that period of time? Why do we listen to consultants that insist that no matter what we’ve done in the past, it’s wrong! Some of the things we’ve done are wrong, sure, I get that, and as such we should certainly abandon them and replace with better things. Some of them however are good, and I’d argue a good number of things we do are neutral and don’t need changing just for the sake of change or minimal money savings.

To me it seems like the consultants out there that I’ve run across in the world of EMS have one of fixing problems. Their solutions to me all seem to be just like the Bobs from Office Space.

But, are they really fixing the problem? Or are they just creating a whole new problem?

And here I thought, apparently mistakenly, that if you took care of the patient, you couldn’t go wrong. I’m such a simpleton. Time for more Kool-Aid from the vat of high performance EMS apparently.

So, I remember a time growing up when if your mother asked why you did something incredibly stupid and the answer almost all kids gave was “all the other kids were doing it” and then you’d get the standard response of “if they jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?”

Which brings me to my current rant. All those years of parental wisdom of not just following the herd for the sake of following the herd. And now, in the infinite wisdom of these high performance EMS liars disciples, and we all need to do all these “standards” simply because they’re standards. And when you ask them, why are they standards, they reiterate that they’re standards and when really pressed they’ll tell you the rest of the industry is doing it all as well.

So, Mr. couldn’t hack it as a paramedic EMS manager, you’re telling me that because all the other acolytes experts in chicanery high performance EMS say that we need to do A, B, or C then we do? Where’s the proof? Where’s the science? Where’s the evidence? Where’s the proof that what you’re doing doesn’t violate the principle of primum non nocere?

We pretend to be scientists, and if Rogue Medic has taught us nothing else we should aim to be that, but, if we’re capable of nothing more than circular logic that is at best faulty, then are we even worthy of pretending to be that? We should all be ashamed of ourselves for putting our patients, our communities, even our families at risk just so we can follow these standards.

Maybe someday, we’ll come to our senses, get out of this 80’s mindset and start thinking about something other than “me”. I mean, it’s been 20+ years since the me decade. Maybe it’s time to do like Burned Out Medic, and think about others. Just once. Maybe…